Announcing our Investment in Luma to Enable Creators
We’re very excited to co-lead Luma’s Seed round alongside Venrock, and are thrilled to have a great group of co-investor VCs and early Zoom investors join the round. Luma helps creators build communities and businesses on top of Zoom. This year has been unlike any other. The mass, sudden consumer behavior change towards online work, communication, and socialization is unprecedented. While these changes create setbacks for most, and opportunities for others, we want to ensure any creator that wants to transition their business and community online has the resources to do so.
Co-founders Dan Liu and Victor Pontis launched Luma at the beginning of April to help a friend host her yoga classes online. Since then, they’ve powered over 20,000 events with over 500,000 attendees, like Nichelle Hines’ Zoom cycling course pictured here. Many Luma hosts are thriving online, leading fitness classes, hosting podcasts, teaching courses, and some have even made over $12,000 per month on the platform. Much like Shopify has enabled 1M SMBs to sell their products online with a turnkey solution, Luma is enabling creators to seamlessly run their online businesses. Thanks to Luma, creators are equipped with community management tools, payment collection and management abilities, analytics, and more. In a time when many are losing their prior source of income, Luma is creating a platform to launch a new business or community. We invested in Luma to support co-founders Dan and Victor with this critical vision worth fighting for.
When we met the Luma team, they had already spent years building timely and innovative projects. Their ability to employ organic and viral marketing tactics to scale their business has been impressive, but unsurprising. This is a testament to Dan and Victor’s high velocity product development, quick iteration, and cultural fixation on customer delight.
We’re also strong advocates of Dan and Victor’s decision to build on top of the Zoom platform. Zoom provides such a huge opportunity to gain massive distribution, and we’ve publicly expressed our conviction in the number of billion dollar businesses that will be built on top of it. We know that Luma can be one of them. So many creators have already used Zoom to move online, and Luma is a perfectly complementary tool for additional resources to do this seamlessly.
There’s so much more to come with Luma. We’re excited to continue building toward a world where creators can host a community unconstrained by geography or start-up costs, and individuals looking for new courses, content and relationships can pursue a variety of diverse options on one platform. From ballet to business strategy courses, find an event on Luma that speaks to you — we hope to see you there!
